AgilePam uses the latest and best web technologies to keep you connected on the cloud, where your work, information, data, files, contact information, everything, is stored safely and securely, in one place," says Leon Smith, lead software engineer at AgilePam, a silver partner at the Finance Indaba Africa 2016 on 13 and 14 October 2016 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.

REGISTER NOW for the Finance Indaba. Limited FREE tickets with with invitation code: FB2016

In the coming weeks and months, we will be chatting to all the Indaba partners, asking them why they are joining the event and what their most important message for finance professionals is.

Do you want to hear how AgilePam can communicate your financial outlook seamlessly? Do you want to be informed about the latest and greatest in finance? Then don't miss the Finance Indaba Africa 2016.

Why will you be present at the Finance Indaba?"The Indaba is one of the largest gatherings of exactly those professionals who would be most interested in AgilePam. We wish especially to build relationships with accounting and auditing bodies as well as their members present at the Indaba: SAICA, SAIPA, CIMA, ACCA, SAIBA, AAT SA. Audit and accounting firms as well as their service-oriented clients are a key community of our target market."

What will you be talking about?"Simplicity. Speed. Knowledge. Running a practice of any kind is no mean feat, and the tools at your disposal are expected to work easily, effectively and consistently. AgilePam, sitting in the cloud as it does, is every practitioner’s constant companion, available everywhere you are, on any device you choose, helping you manage your day and your year quickly, visually and with consummate ease.

"Intuition, agility, integration. Businesses are organic things, run by people, servicing people, who talk to each other and mingle. AgilePam is a single, integrated, multi-faceted system without silo boundaries, always on, instantly refreshed. There are no nodes or sub-systems. There are no delayed batch runs. There is no work duplication."

What are the challenges you can help finance professionals/firms with in 2016?"Communication, cloud transitioning, information. A recent survey found that the top challenge facing finance professionals was learning to work co-operatively. That was followed by managing stress arising from crisis situations, prioritising conflicting deadlines throughout the enterprise, and conveying financial information in non-financial terms.

"AgilePam tackles these challenges head-on, communicating the financial outlook seamlessly and visually, making sense of big data, scheduling services and cases effectively, collecting accurate information from the organization when required, and automatically accounting a large portion of the business’s financial transactions.

"AgilePam uses the latest and best web technologies to keep you connected on the cloud, where your work, information, data, files, contact information, everything, is stored safely and securely, in one place. No more “accounting servers”, update packs, expensive upgrades and “setup consulting”. Just log in.

"With AgilePam, evolving finance professionals can attend to their business and the growth of their skillsets without having to be the CIO as well.

What makes AgilePam a superior practice administration and management system?"AgilePam is a true, holistic practice management system, catering for the entire organization. And it punches way above its perceived weight. On its way to becoming a fully-fledged ERP system in the old sense of the word, AgilePam offers a host of functionality out of the (cloud-based) box:

Absolutely no installation and setup required. AgilePam lives entirely on the cloud, and is available in its current version to all users, always. Upgrades are seamless and invisible, and there is only one version – the current one.

Safe, secure, lockup and go environment. Protected by encrypted authorization cookies on the front-end, industry standard secure socket layers (SSL by Thawte) on the line, encrypted data items on the back-end, and rock solid user management features, you can transact without worrying about server breakdowns or theft, data-loss, or missing drives.

Absolutely no consulting required. Subscribed administrators manage the entire process, from free-trial through package selection, setup, take-on, work and maintenance.

Multi user functional access control by hierarchical communities ensure connected users see only what the administrator intends them to see, and only at their level of the organization.

One system for all. No additional nodes at additional cost, add-ons, bolt-offs or sub-systems. As new functionality comes online, you get it all.

"And a fine system it is too! AgilePam does not conform to any of the definitions applied to contemporary cloud business solutions.

Easy setup and health checks as you go. Define your organization comprehensively. Set up standard templates for the services you provide, fees you charge, expenses you levy, rates you charge, custom fields you maintain, lookup values you use, and a whole lot more.

Take-on as many customers, suppliers, account classes, charts of accounts, persons and open balances as you like via csv files and intuitive column dropping.

Describe your customer base (we call them “Entities”) as fully as required. Maintain the costs of cases, fees and expenses, and their active dates.

Link services, tasks and task durations to individual entities, schedule cases for a full financial year in advance, allocate work to users, and reallocate as required. View work-in-progress in drill-down stream graphs, timelines and case lists.

Associate people with one or more entities, set their system intervention roles, grant uploaded file view access, and grant or deny portal access at a click (or touch…)

Upload files to entities, cases, tasks, or people, and download them again, but this time on your phone.

Capture time by work codes and work types at any time. The drudgery of timesheets is dead… Review hours by user, community and date range in a responsive graphical interface. Flatten hour curves, authorize batches, change billable states and much more.

Manage unit and value-based expenses (disbursements) on a daily basis, as they occur. Forget the batched-slips-day-just-before-posting.

Maintain a simplified inventory, with dated cost and price amounts, for sale to your entities.

And, for those items that will be neither time, service, expense nor fee, capture ad-hoc lines to appear on any invoice.

Execute itemized billing runs for the entire organization, or for selected entities, for any financial period, as often as you like, without affecting the state of your accounts. Review billing scenarios and drill into individual transactions to effect changes before posting.

And when you’re satisfied, post itemized billing runs and their automated accounting entries. Drill into debtor controls by any conceivable filter, including by revenue type, date, amount, vat-code, rate, and many more. Review automated invoices, send them in batches or individually, or just allow portal users to collect them on the cloud, when they wish. Drill into invoice payments, receipts and age buckets and take ownership of your cash flow.

And when it comes to accounting, you’ll find it’s already mostly done. Debtor and creditor transactions are automatically accounted for by billing runs and supplier payments. Use AgilePam’s journal stage editor to capture balanced movements to non-posted stages for approval or disposal. Post at any time. Review the trial balance, bank reconciliation, cash-flow, and vat input and output in an intuitive, graphical environment. Export to csv at will.

And by the way, that simplified (but powerful) accounting node is available to every entity on your system. As a financial services firm, that means unlimited accounting for your clients."​

Tell us about your customer portal."AgilePam’s customer portal isn’t just a place where people look at their invoices. It is a fully-fledged web application, with all the bells and whistles, for your business partners to interact with you. The portal is instantly available to granted people at the check of a box."And it’s a single sign-on application, allowing portal users to interact with all their AgilePam service suppliers in one place."The portal application boasts the same levels of security and authentication, and the same user experience as the parent application."The connected portal user has access to a tight range of activities, which form the basis for substantial growth as the requirements arises:

Access to all their AgilePam service providers on their dashboard page.

Access to each represented entity registered by the service provider.

Ability to download files that have been made accessible by the service provider.

Ability to upload files on request of the service provider.

View of the case schedules for each entity, as well as anticipated costs for services provided.

Ability to notify targeted service provider users of changes, requests and complaints.

Access to all invoices issued to any participating entity, via download, email attachment or direct view. Each view is recorded by the portal, and AgilePam users know at all times whether an invoice has been seen or not.

If available, access to each entity’s trial balance and other accounting reports.

"Of course, the portal is a growing product, as is the parent application. As more activities are introduced, portal users have instant access to them."